


This Is Her Body

by Chaerring



Series: This Is His Love, This is Her Body [2]
Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Always a girl!Q, F/F, F/M, Gen, Language, Spoilers for Skyfall, Women Being Awesome, mentions of genderqueerness, vague mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 21:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaerring/pseuds/Chaerring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q's life has been defined by her transitions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is Her Body

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Don't own Q or Bond or any of it.
> 
> Thanks so much to TheGreatSporkWielder for betaing and listening to me bleed my feelings all over the place.

Q’s life has been defined by her transitions. Once her name was Quinn Kerrington and she dutifully pinned her hair and sat at her mother’s side for afternoon teas. In university she didn’t drink tea at all, but dark coffee. It wasn’t horrible enough if it didn’t stick to the roof of her mouth. She lost Quinn Kerrington to a new section of code in herself. For a while she thought it was what she wanted and she called herself Quincy Kerrington.The pronouns are different and she likes the clothing better, but she still feels like she’s missed some important commands along the way. The one thing Quincy was good for was accepting the dare to crack MI6. When Quincy decides maybe Quinn is better after all the paths are already there for her to retrace and deposit her resume right on M’s desktop. Let it never be said that Q can’t be just as unsubtle as a 00 when she wants to be.

M made it immediately clear she was not impressed and Quinn was not special by getting her expelled from university and forcibly enrolling her in MI6 training. M gave Quinn Kerrington rules about computers and what she could or could not do with them. No one had ever dared to do that before. Following them was the hardest thing Quinn had ever had to do in her life, but she understood M’s ultimatum. Quinn could learn to work within the system and follow the rules, or she could disappear. 

It rankled her to be fetching coffee and filing paperwork for people whom she could could run circles around, but she managed it long enough for M to get over her break in and realize she was better put to use elsewhere. Quinn Kerrington ceased filing paperwork and emerged from field training by the skin of her teeth. She almost hacked the system because she was sure she was being lied to about her endurance scores, but she realized _not_ hacking the system was part of the test. She followed M’s rules and walked the line between field and deskwork as Technical Agent K at the bottom of the Q branch food chain. 

K liked the singularity of her designation and tried out heels and skirts to go with it. It always felt like a spike when she introduced herself, like she was constantly making a point. She still wore nothing except trousers and flats on her own time, but the skirts and the heels gave her an experimental sort of power in the office. In the field, she was the fastest technical agent. Even sticking to M’s rules she could get in and out of a computer in less than half the time that anyone else in the field could. In a profession where having a preference outside of how you take your tea is frowned upon, K began to get a lot of requests for her services on missions. 

That is the thing that finally impressed M.

As her reward, K is sent out on a mission with 004. There’s a plane crash, an eternity in a dark room with pain flying through the pathways in her mind, lighting it up like she’s look at a diagram of her own electrical synapses. 004’s grunts of pain are like a symphony in her ears even through the wall and perversely she’s glad they stay quieter than when they had fucked. 

By the time it’s all said and done she’s lost a kidney and developed a false joint due to infection. Operations fix the joint, but having metal bits in her leg isn’t exactly conducive to some of the fieldwork she was doing. M is impressed enough by her continued drive at least, and hands her directly to Q, the Quartermaster. 

Q takes her in like she’s a vicious puppy that needs to be trained. He reteaches her the value of tea over coffee and how to do what she wants while still following M’s rules. He reads code as fast as she does, and even if his skill came from practice and not naturally he’s a shiny new thing for her though his file says he’s fifty-four. Her ideas get heard, get made, and sent into the field with agents. K wears sweaters and tea stains on her white cuffs. No one looks at her sensible shoes askance and she feels like she fits. She’s happy at the top reaches of Q branch.

007’s death is nothing to her except an email in her inbox and wistful wish that it wasn’t anything like the last 004’s. Then Eve comes by to return her gun, tells K she’s been suspended from duty for a while, and says they should get a drink together sometime. As much as the world’s progressing, there are still few women of their security rank, and M isn’t exactly social. 

K hesitates, looking at the gun in her hand and wondering if she wants to take that on, to be a listening set of ears for Eve, a silent crutch. Then she remembers looking in the mirror at her jaundiced reflection, weeks in the hospital, and the sound of 004’s skull as it cracked on the ground. Eve doesn’t say anything about 007 when they go out for drinks, but K’s not talking about 004 either. Eve slides a hand under K’s untucked shirt along the still smooth skin of her waist and she shivers, letting her. The other woman falls asleep using her chest as a pillow before they get much further and K plays with the curls of her hair until she’s able to sleep herself.

The attack gets by all of them. Soaring around M, yes, but more directly it sneaks past Q and K. They get it before M does. It’s right there in their base, their home, attacking them from M’s own terminal. Q and K are a flurry of motion tracking it back as far as they can. They’re so bloody fucking baffled and distracted by it neither of them notices what it actually does until it’s too late. 

The explosion happens above and to the side of them, but the gas leaks are large enough that chunks of the ceiling come pelting down. K’s priority changes as per emergency procedures and she evacuates Q branch. She retrieves all of their employees from the nooks and crannies sending them out through the safest path she can judge is left. It’s her job to judge what projects can be sent out with each person on a flash drive or in their arms, and what they need to leave behind because their people’s safety is more important. 

The darkness and the smoke clog her lungs, make her feel sick even with her cardigan tied around her mouth. She’s back in the dark with confusion and pain, there’s a roaring in her ears and it’s hard to breathe like the plane crash had been. The difference in it all is Q at his station bleeding noticeably from wounds from the initial explosion, but still standing and gathering the information they would need to bring in the bastard that did this to them. Q dies pressing an external drive into her hands. K makes her way out of Q branch carrying all the knowledge they have of the attack. 

K makes herself small and insignificant; she walks like a man and slips by the rescue personnel that might have otherwise stopped a petite woman coughing her lungs up. She ducks a shock blanket and stumbles towards the tape line just as M comes charging through. It’s easy for K to see the icy anger and need for action sinking into her own veins reflected back at her from her boss’s eyes. 

“Q, you’re to go immediately to the other base and begin working on this problem. Someone from medical will follow you.”

The letter is like an electrical shock to her system. It feels like her, like everything she’s worked towards has clicked into place. She’s upset about the loss of her predecessor, yes, but there’s no time for her to bother mourning. There isn’t any time for her to be anything other than Quartermaster. Her step falters just once where she can’t see the ground through the soot on her glasses, but she covers it neatly and nods.

“Yes, M.”

Still smelling the smoke in her hair and bearing bloodstains on her cardigan, Q proceeds to take control of her branch and new space with a speed that breaks even her own records. Some of her agents call her sir and some call her ma’am; she doesn’t care as long as they do their work. She doesn’t go to the former Q’s funeral because Q lives on and has work to do. 

007 returns from the dead (unlike 004), and Q is distinctly unimpressed by the unshaven man in blue suits or training gear pacing around on her monitors. He’s nothing compared to the problems the attack and relocating have left for her to solve. All the back up planning in the world couldn’t keep them running at 100% and it was her job to get them back at optimum running capacity as soon as possible. She watches everything, not only because it’s her job, but because she finally has permission to, even by M’s rules.

Eve walks around Q branch sometimes when she’s in that limbo space after being incredibly busy and then having to wait on Mallory to finish with M. Q wonders if she ought to be annoyed by the way Eve’s heels click around her branch, but Q’s so utterly content in her sweater with her tea and computers that she can’t quite bring herself to worry about Eve’s lurking. Then, Tanner sends her an email about meeting 007 in a place of her choosing and outfitting him with what she sees fit in order to follow the largest lead they have on the attack.

Q picks The National Gallery, because she doesn’t think she’ll have time to go at any point in the near future. She picks _The Fighting Temeraire_ because she’s always been fond of Turner’s use of color to portray light and there’s nothing about the painting she doesn’t like. There’s something very different about seeing 007 in person rather than on her screens. 

She opens her mouth and can’t stop herself before she bites down on her foot and for a moment she imagines he’s actually emitting a chill from his skin in her direction. It sinks into her through the parka even as the man begins to move away. Bond has something about him that her cameras hadn’t managed to capture.

“007.”

He moves back into place next to her and their ensuing conversation is the most   
ridiculous and trying one she’s had since she started working for MI6. By the time she walks away though, there’s one less knot of tension in her back. She’s not any surer of the fate of their country and doesn’t have any more faith in Bond than she did before she met him, but she can see why M passed him despite his scores. Success, or no, he was quite formidable, and perhaps exactly the move everyone needed to see M making. It’s almost enough to make her wish she did have more than a gun and a radio to give him, but there’s still the problems of their change in location and many other agents to see properly outfitted. She’s Q now, not K, and she can’t afford to think only in one man’s favor when they’re functioning in a limited capacity.

The Quartermaster returns to her job and keeps herself informed as to Bond’s progress, but it’s an afterthought in comparison to gearing up teams for pullouts of first agents whose covers are blown and obliterating Youtube videos into the ether as much as they can be. Bond isn’t brought directly back to her attention until Eve contacts her directly to warn that Bond’s drowned his ear bud in champagne and gone haring off after a woman. 

Q prepares herself for the inevitable distress signal by putting the fear of M into her branch to make sure they watch it while she changes clothes and naps at her desk. Before sleeping she puts the ear bud connected to the tiny listening device in the radio in her ear. The range isn’t very good and it’s a first field test, but she’s hoping it may give her a better idea of what they’re sending troops into when they go to rescue Bond from wherever the hell he’s gone. She didn’t tell 007 about it because she’s not quite sure the listening portion of the radio will work at the distance he’s traveled away. It was a risk giving him experimental equipment, but it was the only thing even close to being operational of that size at the time he needed it.

She wakes up from her nap with the sound of Bond’s voice and guns being cocked in her ear. Baxter’s already at her elbow with her ten point mug steaming in his hands. There’s also a trace on his location narrowing down to a small island not far from Macau. She doesn’t breathe a sigh of relief that the entire device works. Instead, she sends the message to scramble teams to fly towards Bond, and simultaneously notifies M what’s happening. 

Then, Q has the opportunity to prove to M that she made the right choice in promoting her. Q takes everything she learned about observing and coordinating from her predecessor and applies it where she can. She monitors the entire situation objectively with Bond and Silva in one ear and the rescue effort and M in the other. Her fingers fly along the keys in front of her as she tries not to sneer openly at Silva’s rat catching tale and becomes positive that he’s making some sort of sexual advance on Bond. She doesn’t realize she’s not breathing until Baxter drops a folder on her desk and it makes her gasp. She’s careful to keep her face flat instead of sheepish, but she makes a note to try and reward Baxter for being subtle and observant when she can.   
Then Bond’s clothing is rustling in her ears again as she watches the helicopters get closer and closer to the island on her monitors. Silva’s voice fades in and out as he stands closer or further away from James and at one point, though she hasn’t even seen him, she feels like the madman is breathing down her neck. She wonders if Bond is as relieved as she is when her ears fill with the cacophony of helicopter blades.

After that, everything moves quickly. Q gets the camera feeds and stills of the entire scene and puts the pieces together in her head. The shot glasses, the dead woman--it’s not hard to imagine how it went after listening so closely. She doesn’t have time to think about it, though, because they’re handing her Silva’s computer and the ice is crawling back into her veins as she _knows_ instinctively that this is the computer that killed her predecessor and wrecked so much of her branch’s hard work. This is the device used to beat them with their own building and now she has it in her hands. 

Q’s careful. She follows M’s rules instead of diving straight in and burying herself in the code and circuits. She performs all the tests, reads everything M has given her about Silva, and pointedly mutes the conversation in the containment area so that no one can hear it. She read the file. She didn’t need to hear it. It would only do things to her mind that she didn’t need to face while there was work to be done. 

So, Q waits like a good girl as the tests on the computer are running for Bond to show up for a new gun and to see the fruits of his labor. The obfuscated code is tricky, trickier than anything she’s had to deal with before and it’s rankling to be failing with Bond and the whole branch watching so fucking closely, but she knows they can’t do any damn better. Then Bond sees the letters that she might have never guessed, or at least guessed far too late. 

After that, it’s a few keystrokes and she’s in. She’s smug, feeling like she’s conquered the problem. The doors pop open and she’s stunned. It’s nothing like what happened at the other building. Bond’s already running down the hallway snatching up an earpiece from the rack as he goes. She’s still staring blankly at Silva’s laptop as it’s screen fades to read: “Not such a clever boy.” She’s yanking wires out without even thinking. She knows she’s cursing, and embarrassing herself in front of her branch, but she isn’t alone in her cock up. 

A shout from Baxter makes her pick up the comm line just in time to hear 007 curse and tell her Silva’s escaped. It’s their worst nightmare, but it’s exactly what she needs to shelve her own issues and focus on the problem at hand. She follows Bond through the tunnels on her screens feeling ridiculous standing behind her desk while telling him to “put his back into it”. She would gladly have followed him down there and tried herself as he suggested if her health wasn’t already being closely inspected since the explosion. She was removed from field work because she was broken and missing a piece, needing to be held together by metal in her bones.

It’s a different kind of pressure calling the shots like this directly to Bond. She’s his eye in the sky so much more directly than ever before. There’s never been so much on the line as she tracks faces and tries to identify Silva in the crowd. She wishes it was easier to do audio identification. She would never forget Silva’s voice in her ear through the radio, but his face, that was so easily hidden with a cap or scarf. Finally, she finds him for sure and stifles the urge to apologize to Bond as he rolls his eyes and runs for the back of the train. 

From there she doesn’t have much she can do besides send frantic messages to Tanner, trying in vain to get M to pay attention and get out of the fucking building. Bond takes out his ear piece somewhere along the way so she can’t tell him anything even after she hacks into the cameras of the building, breaking more than one of M’s rules as she does. Q, along with her entire branch and the rest of MI6, simply has to hold their breaths and wait until she can hear 007 and M both in the car. 

James Bond presents her with the ultimate challenge of sending Silva on a planned chase. He wants her to send Silva to a Scottish estate named Skyfall without letting him know he’s being sent. It absolutely breaks every single fucking one of M’s rules and that’s without even beginning to consider what the general people of the country would allow. It’s their only option, and if she’s honest with herself, it would be Q’s favorite even if it wasn’t their only choice.

She clears the whole room and orders someone to get Tanner to her as soon as they can before she takes a long drink of tea. It’s cold, and gross, sticking in her mouth like the coffee in university did. She hates it, but it’s a simple matter to order more brewed while she cracks her fingers and begins to work. 

Tanner appears shortly and she points him towards Baxter’s stash of beers while she tries to explain what she’s doing. He follows along and offers fairly helpful suggests with common sense she wouldn’t think of. Mallory’s suggestion is another good one and having his approval isn’t very relieving, but it’s still leagues about him trying to stop her.

Later, she prefers to think of it as her part in Silva’s death, not her part in M’s. 

After M’s gone and Mallory takes over, Q begins to see a lot more of 007. At first she thinks it’s more than she would like to see of him. He unsettles her in a way that people generally don’t, but then again she doesn’t generally get the feeling that other people are constantly undressing her with their eyes and speculating on her body. He circles Eve for a few weeks too, as he’s working on being genuinely cleared for fieldwork, but he seems to come to a decision about her more quickly than he can Q.

Bond goes back to fieldwork, and back to sleeping with every attractive woman he encounters on a mission, but this time, thanks to a new set of M’s rules, Q is there in 007’s ear. He doesn’t drown her in champagne, she’d made sure he knew there would be consequences for destroying equipment like that. James does, however, politely whisper something to her before he leaves the earbud under a glass in a cabinet and goes to sleep with his temporary target.  
Q doesn’t realize she might be in trouble until she sees his reflection in her monitor and thinks: _James is back._ She doesn’t use his given name out loud and she shouldn’t be using it in her mind. Her revelation gets worse when he hands her back his gun for inspection. It doesn’t have any bullets left, of course, but she disassembles it in a few seconds and finds it’s entirely in working order. Her heart clenches a little, and she knows she would sleep with him if he asked. 

Bond doesn’t ask, or even invite her to, though. She sends him out on another mission with an extra bit of equipment that doesn’t come back. It saves his life,though, so she doesn’t bitch too much about it. He still doesn’t make an invitation when he returns and it makes Q start to wonder if she’s read him wrong. Perhaps the undressing is his automatic way of looking at a woman, or he’s not sure he actually likes what he’s imagining is under her layers. She decides not to wonder about it too long and keeps doing her job.

It’s only when Eve points out that James Bond spends far more time in Q branch than anywhere else in MI6 that Q begins to wonder if there’s something different going on in his mind. She starts paying attention to the way he treats women on missions before he silences the earbud in comparison to how he treats her and Eve. There are rather large differences in all three circumstances. Q feels utterly ridiculous even thinking about it, but she plots it out in her mind. 

On missions, 007 seems to embody the ideal of charming mysterious stranger. He pokes lightly at the women, but never prods at their insecurities or makes bloody ridiculous remarks about them having spots. James is friendly with Moneypenny, and ridiculous innuendos aside, his professionalism comes out in spades in her office. In Q branch, Bond’s a little different. He’s got no problem making an ass of himself or looming too close over her shoulder while she works. It occurs to her that she never really tells him not to. She makes him get out of her way, or out of her agents’, but she’s never banned him from coming up to her platform. It says more about her than she cares to examine, so she gives up trying to figure 007 out entirely and ignores whatever conversation Eve tries to start about him.

Thankfully, Bond is in London when the next home related crisis crops up and it’s contained quickly, but not without losses. None are from Q branch, though, so she elects to skip the funeral and stay in the lab as her subordinates file out for a half day to attend or go home to their families. She’s planning to work, because there’s always work to be done in Q branch, but she catches James on the camera in M’s office knocking back a tumbler of scotch and her memory supplies Silva’s voice in her head far too readily. 

Q shuts down all the non-essentials and heads for the part of R&D that she’s not supposed to know is basically a liquor cabinet. She fills her mug and a plain glass, leaving the extra by her elbow and she waits. James doesn’t disappoint her. He comes in quietly and takes the glass automatically. She wishes she had a camera for the face he made at the sweetness of it. She turns her head from his reflection on her screen to the real thing and waits. 

She’s not sure what she’s waiting for. Finally, his invitation to bed, or something else, it doesn’t matter to her. Neither one of them is exactly healthy relationship material, but despite that, she likes him anyway, and it’s enough for whatever it is he wants from her. Something changes in his eyes and she wonders who or what he’s looking at because it’s not her anymore. He knocks back the rest of the glass and she wants to make a face herself because that couldn’t have tasted pleasant. 

“I’ve got something better for shots if that’s what you’re looking for.”

She sips the sweet liquor letting it sting her tongue compared to her usual tea and slips off the platform to get him something more his preference. She still stays away from the amber liquids. She’s probably imagining that he might have a problem with it, but it doesn’t stop her from thinking about it anyway. She doesn’t know what to do, and he’s not talking, so she pulls up shitty telly on her laptop and gets him a chair. It’s a relief to her when James stays until MI6 begins filling back up after the funeral.

The next day M calls her into his office for their weekly talk about her budget. She’s confused at first because he normally comes into the lab when he wants to talk to her about funding. The confusion disappears quickly when he brings up Bond and her professionalism in the most roundabout and polite way possible. Just as politely Q tells him to stuff himself and keep his nose out of her personal life. It wasn’t her best moment, but she doesn’t regret it. Eve, of course, has to walk her out.

“So, Q, you and Bond?”

Q pauses a moment considering how Eve might have come to that conclusion when James has never made any kind of the blatant overtures at her that he does at Moneypenny, and then she decides it doesn’t matter what Eve thinks.

“Not in the usual sort of way, but yes.”

“Are you sure he knows that?”

Q doesn’t stop the smile that stretches her face slightly.

“Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t yet.”

**Author's Note:**

> SO, yeah, this is my baby. 
> 
> If you have any questions about genderqueerness, or anything else in the fic that I didn't elaborate on feel free to ask in a comment. I don't bite. :D


End file.
